Living in the Death Wish

Daily writing prompt

What’s a moment you wish you could freeze and live in forever?

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I can tell you the exact moment.

It is August, late afternoon. The sun is shining but it’s heading to the horizon. After an afternoon of rolling waves, Lake Superior has evened out. The water is blue, the bluest blue, so blue that the lake and the sky could be drawn by a child with a single blue crayon. Cerulean, blue.

I am swimming a breaststroke. My head is out of the water so I can see the dunes of Pictured Rocks and the Au Sable Lighthouse at the end of a curl of land reaching out to passing freighters like a long green ribbon. The water is cold, so cold that it takes me fifteen minutes of wading and waiting and debating to bring my whole self into the water. When I splash lake water on my face, it feels like a drunk’s effort to forget the night before.

Everything about this moment is perfect and remarkable and precious. And if I died tomorrow, no, if I knew I was to die tomorrow, say I am lying in a hospital bed with teary-eyed people all about, I’d close my eyes and swim in the freezing water toward the setting sun, my arms stretched out like wings.